Searching for God # 127 Part One

  Sometimes attempting to ‘connect the dots’ by asking naive, innocent and enigmatic questions is a little unsettling. If this scribe is being unsettled, as I am, then readers might wish to be given a heads-up before jumping into the murky waters of this piece. Consider the heads-up given! 

In her provocative and challenging work, The Case for God, Karen Armstrong, in a chapter entitled, “Unknowing” that details the dramatic shift from what had been promised as the certainty of science in the nineteenth century, to a state depicted by Virginia Wolfe, quoted by Ms Armstrong: ‘In or about December 1910, human nature changed,’ Wolfe wrote after visiting the startling exhibition of French postimpressionist painters. Artists deliberately flouted their viewer’s expectations, tacitly proclaiming the need for a new vision in a new world. Old certainties were evaporating. (p. 262) 

Armstrong continues:  

But the First World War revealed the self-destructive nihilism that, despite its colossal attainments, lurked at the heart of modern Western civilization. It has been described as the collective suicide of Europe: by slaughtering a generation of young men, the war so damaged European society at its core that arguably it has never fully recovered. The utter futility of trench warfare, fought as it was for no adequate social, ideological, or humanitarian cause, defied the rationalism of the scientific age. The most advanced and civilized countries in Europe had crippled themselves and their opponents with their new military technology simply to serve the national ego. The war itself seemed a terrible parody of the mechanical ideal: once the intricate mechanism of conscription, troop transportation, and the manufacture of weapons had been switched on, it seemed to acquire its own momentum and proved almost impossible to stop. (P.262) 

Skip a few pages in Armstrong’s tome to these words: 

The Second World War (1939-45) revealed the terrifying efficiency of modern violence. The explosion of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki laid bare the nihilistic self-destruction at the heart of the brilliant achievements of Homo technologicus. Our ability to harm and mutilate one another had kept pace with our extraordinary economic and scientific progress, and we seemed to lack either the wisdom or the means to keep our aggression within safe and appropriate bounds. Indeed, the shocking discovery that six million Jews had been systematically slaughtered in the Nazi camps, an atrocity that had originated in Germany a leading player in the Enlightenment, called the whole notion of human progress into question. (p.275) 

James Hillman in A Blue Fire, ed. Thomas Moore, quotes Hemingway: 

Hemingway writes that after World War 1: ‘abstract words such as glory, honor, courage...were obscene beside the concrete images of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers, the regiments and the dates.’ (And Hillman continues): 

How rare for anyone to know the date of Alamogordo (or even where it is), the date of Hiroshima, of the first hydrogen bomb explosion, or the names of people or places or units engaged. Gone in abstraction. Glenn Gray writes: ‘Any fighting unit must have a limited and specific objective. A physical goal—a piece of earth to defend, a machine-gun nest to destroy, a strong point to annihilate—more likely evokes a sense of comradeship. Martial psychology turns events into images: physical, bounded, named. Hurtgen Forest, Vimy Ridge, Iwo Jima, A beach, a bridge, a railroad crossing: battle places become iconic and sacred, physical images claiming the utmost human love, worth more than my life. Quite different is the transcendent experience of the nuclear fireball. The emotion is stupefaction at destruction itself rather than a heightened regard for the destroyed. Nuclear devastation is not merely a deafening cannonade or firebombing carried to a further degree. It is different in kind: archetypally different. It evokes the apocalyptic transformation of the world into fire, earth ascending in a pillar of cloud, an epiphanic fire revealing the inmost spirit of all things, as in the Buddha’s fire sermon: 

All things, O priests, are on fire...the mind is on fire, ideas are on fire....mind consciousness is on fire. 

Or like that passage from the Bhagavad Gita which came to Oppenheimer when he saw the atomic blast: 

‘If the radiance of a thousand suns 

Were burst at once into the sky 

That would be like the splendour of the Mighty One.’ 

The nuclear imagination leaves the human behind for the worst sin of all: fascination by the spirit: Superbia. The soul goes up in fire (Hillman, A Blue Fire, p. 182-3) 

And now another source, much more contemporary....professor Timothy Snyder, formerly of Yale, now of the University of Toronto on Substack: 

‘Superpower suicide’ is a concept to help understand the approach of the Trump regime to the rest of the world. We are fighting a war for no reason we can name, losing it, and covering our defeat with genocidal and apocalyptic propaganda. This is bad enough on its own; but I think this performance is symptomatic of something deeper—a systematic undoing of American power by Americans. 

David Suzuki, in an interview published July 2, 2025, with iPOLITICS.ca  is reported to utter these words: 

I believe an informed public will do the right thing. Public concern in the late 1980’s was right at the top and we had the first international conference on the atmosphere in 1988, where there were 300 people, over 40 governments, environmentalists, scientists, private sector people, you name it. At the end of that conference, they said global warming represented a threat to humanity, second only to global nuclear war. If the world had followed the conclusions from that conference, we would not have the problem we face today and we would have saved billions of dollars and millions of lives. 

Now, it is too late. 

I’ve never said this before to the media, but it’s too late. I say that because I go by science and John Rockstrom, the Swedish scientist who leads the Potsdam Institute, has defined nine planetary boundaries. These are constraints on how we live. ....There are nine planetary boundaries and we’ve only dealt with one of them—the ozone layer—and we think we’ve saved ourselves from that threat. But we passed the seventh boundary this year, and we’re in the extreme danger zone. Rockstrom says we have five years to get out of the danger zone. If we pass one boundary, we should be shitting our pants. We’ve passed seven! 

Professors continually railed against “scissors and paste” essays in which the writer merely ‘pastes’ together some ‘quotes’ to demonstrate some superficial erudition without offering anything original. 

Well, only the first part of this essay is in compliance.....now for the second part!